A wide variety of promotional marketing and advertising methods and techniques are utilized to provide promotional information, such as advertisements, coupons, rebates, sale information, and/or discount offers, to a consumer. Examples of traditional promotional techniques include the use of flyers, mailings, coupon dispensers, and freestanding newspaper inserts. More modern marketing techniques, including the use of modern technologies and communication media including the use of email, the Internet, etc. Each of these examples may provide a consumer with promotional information, such as an offer to participate or enroll in a marketing program, to open an account, and the like.
However, conventional communication techniques such as advertisements, mailings, flyers, and email communications typically cannot be tailored or customized per the customer and/or validated or activated in real-time or near real-time. Instead, various conventional techniques typically can only transmit active coupons or other incentives, and cannot tailor or otherwise limit the promotion program based on an individual, based on the number of individuals already participating, and/or permit real-time or near-real-time responses, information, and feedback. Moreover, these various conventional techniques fall short of enticing the consumer with sufficient information, while at the same time increasing the conveniences on the consumer and decreasing the costs and efforts of the entity maintaining the marketing or other program. First, with some promotion marketing techniques, such as billboards, posters, radio advertisements, and television advertisements, the consumer is not provided with information that they can review at a later point in time. The consumer may also desire additional information for regarding the promotion that is not provided by a billboard or poster. Additionally, with conventional marketing techniques, the consumer may be provided with information that is easily misplaced or lost and, therefore, not readily accessible at a subsequent point in time. The entities offering or maintaining marketing promotions can benefit from obtaining analyzing the performance or conditions of the promotion before activating the promotion for the customer; however, doing so can be cumbersome and impractical with these conventional techniques.
With the widespread use of mobile devices, such as cellular phones or smart phones, new methods for providing promotional information to consumers have been developed. For example, text message advertisements may be sent to a mobile device. Conventional mobile marketing techniques, such as text message advertisements, may have costs associated with them that a user of a mobile device is unwilling to pay. Moreover, these new mobile marketing techniques are limited to communications via the single channel of cellular communications and typically only with individuals that have expressly opted for receiving the communications. Accordingly, these conventional mobile marketing techniques may not reach a given segment of a target audience.
Therefore, a need exists in the art for systems, methods, and apparatus for addressing some or all of the shortcomings and limitations of existing promotion communication techniques.